The crisis of missing jobs in a country full of work

> There is a shortage of jobs but no shortage of work to be done in our communities. What would it mean to design a strategy to address joblessness that is centred around the work that needs doing for the common good, rather than focusing only on the work that markets find valuable?  Democratic South Africa was born with unemployment as  one of its many wounds , and in the years since, it has remained at the top of the policy agenda. Today more than  four-in-10 working-age adults in South Africa are unemployed or too discouraged to keep looking for work.  We know that the experience of unemployment is a deeply corrosive one for both individuals and society. It registers in  poll after  poll as the problem that most worries us. The consequences of unemployment, too, are widely recognised. It makes people spectators in their communities: standing outside, looking in, unable to contribute. For young people especially, it  delays or derails the milestones for social belonging. And because unemployment is the  single biggest determinant of poverty , it is also a mechanism through which inequality reproduces itself.  Framing a crisis The way a problem is framed shapes the response. One reason that interventions to address unemployment have been insufficient, we argue, lies in the framing itself. When we say, "unemployment crisis," attention is implicitly directed to those without work: their qualifications and skills, their job-seeking strategies, their attitudes. The jobseeker becomes the problem to be solved. This has produced its own minor economy of supply-side interventions: another skills certificate, another work-readiness intervention, another CV workshop, and so on. When these fail, the focus turns to entrepreneurial mindsets and ambitions, even though successful enterprise requires capital, information, connections, and customers with disposable income - all factors that existing structural inequalities inhibit and jo